Glaxo Scientist, Surgeon Targeting Historic British Hockey Gold

Hannah Macleod of Britain reacts after winning the Women's Final during the Visa International Invitational Hockey Tournament - LOCOG Test Event for London 2012 at Riverbank Arena - Hockey Centre on May 6, 2012 in London. Photographer: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images

May 17 (Bloomberg) -- When British field hockey goalkeeper
Abi Walker isn’t trying to stop balls smashed at speeds up to 70
miles an hour, she’s busy as a surgeon on the operating table.
She sees similarities between the two skills.

The 30-year-old works one day a week in the hospital,
training in plastic surgery or ear, nose and throat work. The
rest of the time she spends with the Olympic hockey squad in the
run-up to the London Olympics, starting July 27.

“In medicine, if you become very emotionally attached to
it, it can cloud your thinking,” Walker, reserve goalkeeper for
Team GB, said in an interview. “In hockey, you can have one
situation which seems really critical, but you actually have to
distance yourself from that. Particularly as a goalkeeper, if
maybe you’ve made a mistake, if you’ve let in a goal, you can’t
carry that with you through the whole game.”

The 28-women strong British team will know tomorrow morning
whether they have made final cut. After training together at
their base in Bisham Abbey, 34 miles west of London, for three
years, a squad of sixteen women plus two reserves will be going
to the games. Although the team won a four-nation test event on
the bright blue pitch of the Riverbank Arena at the Olympic Park
earlier this month without conceding a single goal, it sustained
injuries to two key players, Crista Cullen and Alex Danson.

The British women have only made the podium once since
their sport had its Olympic debut in 1980, winning bronze in
Barcelona in 1992. Having failed to qualify for Athens in 2004,
they finished sixth in Beijing. Bronze followed at the European
Championships in 2009 and 2011.

Warm-up Events

In February, the fourth-ranked British team played in its
first Champions Trophy final, losing to Olympic bronze medalists
Argentina after beating third-ranked Germany. In the same
tournament, they drew 2-2 with Olympic champion Holland, the
world No. 1 on the rankings of the International Hockey
Federation.

Walker will return to medicine full-time after the games.
Sometimes the sport has had a negative impact on her medical
career, she said.

“I’ll be honest, there have been times that I’ve been a
little bit nervous about playing hockey,” Walker said. “I’ve
had to sit some surgical exams with a broken finger, because I’d
broken my finger in hockey the night before. There have been
times when it has been a bit challenging.”

Scotland-born Walker isn’t the only member of the squad
who’s combining top-level sports with a profession. Although
British Hockey receives 3.8 million pounds ($6.2 million) a year
in U.K. Sport funding and last year struck a five-year
sponsorship deal with Investec Plc, a private bank with
operations in the U.K. and Africa, many players have jobs or are
studying because their sport doesn’t have a professional league.

Research

Hannah MacLeod combined playing hockey for her club
Leicester and the England and Great Britain teams with studying
for a Ph.D. in exercise physiology at Nottingham Trent
University. MacLeod, 27, also worked for GlaxoSmithKline Plc,
the U.K.’s biggest drugmaker, as a sports scientist on its
Lucozade energy drink. She left last November to dedicate her
time to winning Britain’s first gold in women’s field hockey,
and plans to go back to work after the games.

“It’s about time management and realizing how productive
you can be,” MacLeod said, when asked how hard it was to
combine work with trying to get fit to run as much as six miles
a game. “I think there are a lot of athletes that are very used
to a very comfortable life. Until you’ve actually realized how
hard you can work perhaps in a different environment, it makes
full-time hockey training a bit easier.”

Transformed

Women’s hockey has been “transformed” since the team
started training in Bisham Abbey three years ago, according to
MacLeod. Better facilities, and support from the English
Institute of Sport on nutrition and performance analysis, have
“moved us from being ranked seventh in the world to a team
competing for gold,” she said.

Britain is 9-2 to win its first Olympic title in London,
behind the Dutch women (2-1) and Argentina (3-1), according to
U.K. bookmaker William Hill Plc. Britain is 4-5 to win any
medal.

The 550-member British Olympic squad, the biggest ever, is
expected to deliver a record medal haul on home soil. The
country finished fourth in Beijing with 47 medals. Like MacLeod
and Walker, 70 percent of the squad will be competing in their
first Olympics.

London last hosted the Games in 1948, so no one has
competed in front of an Olympic home crowd. The hockey team’s
penultimate test before the Olympics will be the Investec London
Cup on June 5-10.

“It does come with a particular pressure in that obviously
there is going to be a crowd with expectations,” Walker said.
“But I think that’s going to be a positive thing.”